[openbiblio-dev] Bibserver Status

[Sylvain Hellegouarch]

Hi all,


2014-08-18 2:30 GMT+02:00 Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>:

> Open Streetmap ran for several years without a bank account. Journal of
> Machine Learning Research similarly. (It had to get one to prove to the
> accountant that they didn't spend anything - and then they had to pay the
> accountant to prove they hadn't spent money. Blue Obelisk costs 20 USD per
> year which I spend on Blue Obelisks. Tey aren't without costs but they
> avoided money.
>
> Yes, in general you need money, but not always. And this project will find
> it difficult to get money as there is no clear case to ask for it (yet).
> There's also no clear deliverable. Some of the costs can be met by marginal
> costs on existing systems. If you can come upm with a clear delieverable
> maybe you can get a Kickstarter. But it will have tobe clear, useful and
> achievable.
>
>
>
I think it's realistic to consider not having money and a very quiet
community on this project indeed. I would probably say that most OSS
projects live that way for years. OpenSSL is an interesting example of a
critical piece of software that was hardly funded before heartblead was
discovered. Even then, I don't think it suddenly got massively funded.

The CherryPy project never got any money from anyone, still, thirteen years
on and it's still there. It's just very slowly maintained.

OSS requires patience, optimism and an open-mind. Nonetheless, I would say
it's quite important to clearly state how people should contribute so that
you can quickly review a submitted patch or PR and include it. This is
quite critical.

Good luck for this very interesting project!
-- 
- Sylvain
http://twitter.com/lawouach
http://www.defuze.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/openbiblio-dev/attachments/20140819/6b23e072/attachment-0002.html>